We seek in vain through the record of Luther's earlier years for indications of that stormy, passionate zeal for improvement in the conditions about him which almost any student of the later reform would suppose to be the moving impulse of his character. Conformity to the demands of his immediate surroundings is as marked a trait with him as were resistance and restlessness with Erasmus. He goes and does as he is bidden. He enters a monastery of his own free will and conforms with painful exactness to the requirements of the rule. Even long after he has begun to lead the fight against the limitations of the existing order, he continues to wear the dress and to live in the cloister of the local Augustinians. The impulse to the Lutheran reform cannot, therefore, be found in any restless impatience of personal limitation on Luther's part. It must be sought in some great, overpowering conviction which drove him out of the attitude of conformity into the attitude of resistance. This overmastering impulse came in the form of that Augustinian proposition we were just now examining--the proposition that the salvation, or, better still, the justification, of a man's soul was to come, not through any institution, nor through the due performance of anything whatever, but through the direct act of the grace of God, and, furthermore, that the only condition of receiving such grace was an honest opening of the soul to its action,--or, in theological language, "faith." Luther was not a great "theologian," as that word was used, in reverence by some and in ridicule by others. He had not worked himself out into clearness by a scholastic process, and whenever he tried to defend himself by scholastic methods, he was almost sure to confuse himself in contradictions and exaggerations. His clearness of vision came rather by an indefinable process of revelation and self-realisation, and then it became his life-problem to interpret to others what had brought such abundant illumination and satisfaction to himself. The boldness of Luther was not that of a man defiant by nature, who enjoys the game of give and take, but rather that of a man who puts off the moment of his attack until he can do so no longer, and then lets himself go, driven from behind, as it were, by a will greater than his own and against which he is powerless. With a nature and a method like this Erasmus could never have had much sympathy. Compare their two views of Italy. We have seen Erasmus seeking there the rewards of scholarship, cultivating the society of learned men, playing the rôle of the famous scholar himself, making himself acceptable to the powers that were, getting out of Italy what he could--then coming away and letting all the shafts of his biting satire play upon this society where he has been feeling himself at home. He could eat the bread and take the pay of Aldus, and then hold him up to the laughter of the world.